The documentary uses footage of various
eoidemic outbreaks and their aftermath
to anchor i ts sci enti fi c and factual
voi ceovers. After bei ng fi lmed,
processed, and broadcast, places and
people serve to i ltustrate
a narrative,
appearing as allegories of the fear of
infection.
The Biohazards drawings
translate images from the context 'in
which they are usually aired, allowing
viewers to take up di fferent relationships to what they see.

PART II) A select'ion of fragments from
a documentary thritter
about the Ebola
epi demic , grouped i nto categori es and
recomposed 'i n non-narrati ve sequences.
The categories consist of grammatical
terms (like "'if "and "but") and topics
that appear in the text (such as
"vi rus" and "fear" ) .

e book imparts the exci tabi 1i ty
derivable from the "it could happen
here" scenario, building up narrative
tension by revealing various potentiat
routes through which the infect'ion
could have spread beyond 'its narrowly
The Hot Zone Index
confined limits.
extracts language from its narrat'ive
access
function, providing a different
to the events descri bed.

Thucydides, Defoe, and Camus
described the plague as a social
phenomenon, usi ng 'i t to reveal the
workings and collapse of human
'institutions.
Recent representat.ions
of eoidemics enact the drama of
international
relations.
wh'ich are
seen through the lens of contagion
and quarant'ine.

S'ince the conf erence, the topi c of
ighly contag'ious diseases has
come something of a media staple,
ith accounts informing the public
f industrialized
countries about
the oossible threat of infection.
hese narratives play out anxieties
bout the stabilitv
of boundaries
that parcel up all usable land
ng legally rec ogni zed nati ons.

In L977,fo11owing an epidemic of the
Ebota virus in Congo (then Zaire), an
i nternat'iona1 colloqu'ium was held i n
Antwerp. Sponsored by both the World
Health 0rgani zation and the Pri nce
Leopold Inst'itute of Tropi cal Med'icine,
the colloquium listed examples of "vjral
disease(s) apparently'new'
to medicine"
ori gi nati ng i n former coloni es , i ncluding the ll{est Njle Virus, Kyasanur Forest
Disease, O'Nyong Nyong Fever, Bolivian
Haemorrhagic Fever, and the Marburg and
Ebola Fevers.
5ource'. International
Colloquium on
Ebola Virus Infection and 0ther
Haemorrhagic Fevers,Pattyn, 5.R. (New
York: Elsevier Biomedical Press, 1,978)

The movie 0utbreak is a Hollywood fan
tasy of what would happen if borders
ere crossed and an eoidemic of an
incurable and almost absurdlv contai ous vi rus occu r red i n the Uni ted
tates. The mi 1 i tary takes over the
government, the hospitat becomes a
pri son, and fi nally an enti re ci ty i s
marked for nuclear eliminat'ion.